Alison Harling was appointed Production Manager for Pland Stainless in Leeds a little over a year ago. No stranger to the production environment Alison started at the age of 16 sewing men’s suits and shirts but she moved into the engineering environment when working at Linpac Packaging in 2000. Here she completed many management courses but due to her strength in maths decided to qualify in Production, Mechanical and Electrical engineering twice receiving ‘engineer of the year’ award at college.
Since then she’s had a wealth of experience in ‘Best Practice’ production. She was on the project team at Linpac that opened new sites in St Helens and Poland where she travelled extensively and was involved with commissioning equipment and the selection and training of new recruits. Following Linpac she went into precision engineering, managing an imperial manual machine shop and successfully bringing in CNC machines to improve productivity.
At Pland Alison is focusing on multi-skilling of the work force and disseminating knowledge to make the production unit more flexible and able to adapt quickly to customer requirements. She’s working on implementing SOP’s (standard operating procedure), simplifying product ranges that have grown vast and complex over time and updating procedures and instruction as well as looking at automation as necessary. She’s certainly at home in this shop floor environment.
Whilst Alison’s strength lies in production management, she truly appreciates the skill in engineering. “I love to see a true craftsman at work. The hands-on engineer is far more talented in my eyes. But I will stick to the paperwork side.” She says modestly about her contribution.
Surrey born, Alison has lived in Yorkshire since she was 12 and now lives in a local village with her children and family.
